it gives such completeness to his life that it seems to him to be a joyous pulse of the life that is absolute.  The feeling of unity may be an illusion.  This we cannot discuss here; but, in any case, it is a feeling essential to religion.  And the philosophy which seeks to lift this feeling into clear consciousness and to account for its existence, cannot but recognize that it implies and presupposes the essential affinity of the divine nature with the nature of man.

Thus, both from the side of morality and from that of religion, we are brought to recognize the unity of God with man as a spiritual being.  The moral ideal is man’s idea of perfection, that is, his idea of God.  While theology and philosophy are often occupied with the vain task of bridging a chasm between the finite and the infinite, which they assume to be separated, the supreme facts of the life of man as a spirit spring from their unity.  In other words, morality and religion are but different manifestations of the same principle.  The good that man effects is, at the same time, the working of God within him.  The activity that man is,

                                “tending up,
  Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man
  Upward in that dread point of intercourse
  Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Death in the Desert.]

                              “God, perchance,
  Grants each new man, by some as new a mode,
  Inter-communication with Himself
  Wreaking on finiteness infinitude."[B]

[Footnote B:  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

And while man’s moral endeavour is thus recognized as the activity of God within him, it is also implied that the divine being can be known only as revealed, and incarnated, if one may so say, in a perfect human character.  It was a permanent conviction of Browning, that

      “the acknowledgment of God in Christ
  Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
  All questions in the earth and out of it.”

So far from regarding the Power in the world which makes for righteousness, as “not-ourselves,” as Matthew Arnold did in his haste, that Power is known to be the man’s true self and more, and morality is the gradual process whereby its content is evolved.  And man’s state of perfection, which is symbolized for the intelligent by the term Heaven, is, for Browning,

  “The equalizing, ever and anon,
  In momentary rapture, great with small,
  Omniscience with intelligency, God
  With man—­the thunder glow from pole to pole
  Abolishing, a blissful moment-space,
  Great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire—­
  As sure to ebb as sure again to flow
  When the new receptivity deserves
  The new completion."[A]

[Footnote A:  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

Thus, therefore, does the poet wed the divine strength with human weakness; and the principle of unity, thus conceived, gives him at once his moral strenuousness and that ever present foretaste of victory, which we may call his religious optimism.